By the release of its last album—a 2010 tribute to friend and label boss Tony Wilson—the Durutti Column seemed to embody more of Vini Reilly than his actual body. Perennially frail, sick, and gaunt, the ambient guitar composer had devoted his life to a sprawling catalog, some 40 albums wide, that resembles a matchstick model of paradise. Later in 2010, he had the first of three strokes. His fretboard-wandering fingers struggled to find their way home. “I carried on and on after my strokes and I got to a level [that was] not even close,” he told The Guardian in 2023, speaking with a resignation that bordered on torment. “I really can’t play guitar. It looks ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous.”
The rebirth of the Durutti Column suggests Reilly’s catastrophic imagination is just as potent as his world-building one. The band’s cult, long celebrated by Johnny Marr and John Frusciante, has recently ballooned to the point it can soundtrack fashion shows and, apparently, inspire a Harry Styles album. Renascent, a miracle of faith and circumstance, exists in large part thanks to Reilly’s long-serving percussionist and manager, Bruce Mitchell, and, compositionally, multi-instrumentalist Keir Stewart, whose co-writes include a dazzling new arrangement of the classic Durutti loosie “For Belgian Friends.”
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Their stewardship likely extends to helping Reilly orchestrate his own thoughts. In 2013, after his third stroke, the beleaguered composer told the Quietus he had “complete pieces of music” in his head with “nowhere to go.” A decade later, the inverse problem: Coordination restored, he told Uncut, “There are no tunes happening in my head. There’s nothing of substance coming through.”
The trio has sporadically worked on Renascent since 2017. Reilly and Stewart picked up the pace during pandemic lockdowns, remote-working in charmingly anachronistic fashion: Parked outside Reilly’s kitchen, Stewart would track sessions from a recording desk squeezed into the back of his van. Despite the project’s associations with jazz, improv, and post-punk, Durutti Column transcendence rarely arises from a guys-in-the-room mentality; Reilly seems to compose in profound isolation, letting ambered reverb pool out from his fingers. New songs “Vapour in a Matchbox” and “Time Present and Past” re-awaken that Durutti Column promise to concoct minimalism, romanticism, and ambient into a sort of universal music.
Reilly has always written and released at the rapid pace of a man who expects somebody to come along and trample his plans at any moment. Despite its drawn-out creation, much of Renascent feels accordingly quick, steered by his instinct for improvised harmonic splatter snatched into the song from a parallel dimension. “Your Shadow at Morning” fires out astral flares that dance off into flamenco trills recalling his 1989 masterpiece Vini Reilly.
The pensive, prettier songs do not always play to his strengths. One of two vocal turns from his Manchester neighbor Caoilfhionn Rose, “Agonistes,” is a marvel, her swoons and wails duetting with ecstatic, skedaddling guitar figures. The other, “Sargasso Sea,” limpid and elegiac, has the purified air of those unsatisfying tribute concerts held—often posthumously—for leftfield artists at expensive venues. Reilly, who composed the song wholesale, seems content to swap his Satie-esque irresolution for something straightforwardly plaintive, like a lullaby.
